Don’t copy us

From
Ralph deVoil

What should we do to plan for an environmental or otherwise self-inflicted disaster that collapses our civilisation, as Peter Inkpen discusses (20 December 2003, p 34)? What if our record of knowledge becomes lost for all time? Would this really be such a bad thing?

If said records were intended to assist a future civilisation to establish itself, then the best lesson that could be gained from such records would be some fairly strong clues about how not to conduct a civilisation. Perhaps along with the suggested Rosetta Stone, this preface should be applied to the recorded knowledge&colon; “This is …